The Brooklyn Rail Talks to Arthur Sze About Sight Lines

For the October issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Tony Leuzzi talks to poet Arthur Sze about his new collection, Sight Lines (Copper Canyon, 2019). "A deeply-concerned citizen of the world, his poems dramatize the conflicts, confusions, triumphs, and joys that occur on this planet—and, in some cases, are the planet," writes Leuzzi in his introduction. From their conversation:

Rail: Many of the poems in the book evoke images that come through senses other than sight. Given this, I was intrigued by the title. Why did you select Sight Lines? Did you write the penultimate title poem first, or did you settle on the book title and then create the poem in response to it?

Sze: The poem “Sight Lines” was written at the request of Lisa Russ Spaar. Lisa contacted me about an anthology she was editing that related, in any way, to Thomas Jefferson and asked if I would write a poem. At first, I thought I can’t write anything “on demand,” but then I decided writing about him and his legacy could be an interesting challenge. Living in Santa Fe, I also thought about how New Mexico was outside of America when Thomas Jefferson lived. I did some research and gave myself the invented formal structure that each line had to pick up a word or words from the previous line (this included the title), and so the structure of the poem was an experiment in repetition and embodied line and circle. I liked how the poem came out, and I thought by taking a bead on America it did something important that I hadn’t done before. In the past, I’ve usually titled my books after long sequences, where the major, title poem is clear. With this short poem, I considered how all the different one-liners were a form (not limited by sight) of sight line. Then, I laid out on the floor all the poems I had written and saw “sight lines” running through so many of the poems: from the evaporating lines of water calligraphy to a single line from C.D. Wright...

Continue this line of sight here.